[HN Gopher] How Excessive Red Meat Consumption Increases Colorec...
___________________________________________________________________
How Excessive Red Meat Consumption Increases Colorectal Cancer Risk
Author : gnabgib
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-10-25 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nccs.com.sg)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nccs.com.sg)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Summary: In the lab, using selected "standard lines" of cancer
| cells, it looked fairly plausible that iron encourages the growth
| of colorectal cancer cells.
|
| Eating "excessive" red meat seems very likely cause high iron
| concentrations in your lower intestines. Beyond that - YMMV.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| So it's a junk headline? Also, telomerase activation is heavily
| correlated with longevity and less risk of disease.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Per dietaryguidelines.gov cereal contains 8 times more iron
| per calory than beef: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resou
| rces/2020-2025-dietar...
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| So the answer is yes, lol
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| Is this why millennials and early genx are seeing higher
| rates
| photonthug wrote:
| > Beyond that - YMMV.
|
| Looking at Inuit and Mongolian populations for stuff like this
| would likely be a good approach to actually learn stuff. Almost
| a strictly meat diet, but without all the confounding variables
| of sedentary office workers, industrial chemicals, and highly
| processed foods with tons of sugar.
| stackghost wrote:
| There's more to it than diet. Genetics also plays a large
| role. I'd be leery of generalizing dietary advice across
| ethnicities.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| ... and microbiota, too. Colorectal cancer is located at
| the end of a very densely "populated" tube.
|
| In all likelihood, Inuit microbiota is very far from
| Western one, at least as long as they don't adapt Western
| diet.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I wonder if tea, coffee, wine, phytate containing foods (beans,
| nuts) and calcium rich foods (dairy, etc) would counter the
| risk by blocking iron absorption.
| fyt2024 wrote:
| Just getting celiac disease would counter iron intake :-)
| tcdent wrote:
| The correlation with Iron makes me wonder if the polymerization
| of cooking oils is related.
|
| https://www.lodgecastiron.com/cleaning-and-care/cast-iron/sc...
| Findecanor wrote:
| I have heard of there having been earlier studies that have
| linked iron intake with colon cancer growth, and I have
| personal reason to believe them.
|
| I have Lynch syndrome: a hereditary cell mutation which
| increases risk of colon cancer. Patients like me get a
| colonoscopy every eighteen months or so only to remove polyps.
| For a decade I had not had a single polyp to remove.
|
| Then in 2022, I got another cancer which gave me blood
| deficiency (low hemoglobin levels), and just to keep myself
| alive I took strong iron supplements for months. It did of
| course also stress my immune system. I got colon cancer in
| record time, which surprised also my doctors. It grew from no
| visible polyp (my last colonoscopy) to two inches in nine
| months, and in-between that I had an X-ray that also showed
| nothing (but which can't detect tumors small enough).
| smm11 wrote:
| Everything in excess might be a problem. I guess the Standard
| American Diet is better, right?
| henning wrote:
| OK. How much red meat do you need to eat to have the excessive
| high iron levels likely to trigger the behavior under
| consideration in the study? How much higher is the risk?
|
| Also, spinach has iron. So excessive spinach consumption at
| levels that most people couldn't tolerate could also increase
| colorectal cancer risk? Or no?
| ygouzerh wrote:
| That's a good question, spinach have the same type of iron than
| in red meat, iron-(Fe3+), so it seems that it could a culprit
| as well.
|
| It looks like however the absorption of iron in red meat is
| quite high (15%-35%) compared to spinach (2-5%), so maybe not
| enough to really be a risk factor.
| stackghost wrote:
| Vegans, especially vegan women of menstruating age, are well
| known to be almost universally iron-deficient, because our
| bodies absorb iron from meats much more readily than other
| (such as vegan) sources.
|
| Interestingly, Vitamin C increases the rate at which you can
| get iron from greens such as spinach. So maybe a glass or
| orange juice and a bowl of salad a day keeps the doctor away.
| david-gpu wrote:
| If you want vitamin C without the sugar load of drinking
| orange juice, you may be interested to learn that bell
| peppers have a _much_ higher content of vitamin C than
| oranges, either per gram or per calorie.
|
| Edit: Let me offer some USDA data points for those who are
| curious, but not curious enough to bother Googling for
| themselves.
|
| Red Bell Peppers: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-
| app.html#/food-details/170108/n...
|
| Green Bell Peppers: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-
| app.html#/food-details/2258588/...
|
| Oranges: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-
| details/746771/n...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Even green ones?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Yeah but Vegans consume a lot of vitamin C so that makes a
| lot of sense.
|
| Also explains why I crave red meat and vitamin C after a
| workout. Can't get enough of the stuff.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Interesting; I have never craved vegetables or fruits after
| a strength training workout. Only anything high in protein.
| Eggs, red meat, chicken, whatever.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| False! probably? :)
|
| Vegetarian resource group 2018
| https://www.vrg.org/nutrition/iron.php
|
| > Some might expect that [...] vegans might be prone to
| developing iron deficiency anemia. However, surveys of vegans
| have found that iron deficiency anemia is no more common
| among vegetarians than among the general population although
| vegans tend to have lower iron stores.
|
| > In fact, if the amount of iron in these foods is expressed
| as milligrams of iron per 100 calories, many foods eaten by
| vegans are superior to animal-derived foods.[...] you would
| have to eat more than 1700 calories of sirloin steak to get
| the same amount of iron as found in 100 calories of spinach.
|
| > Another reason for the satisfactory iron status of vegans
| is that vegan diets are high in vitamin C
|
| 2021 Norway health institute
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33803700/
|
| > In conclusion, although the participants were eating a
| plant-based diet, the majority had sufficient iron status
|
| Nutrients 2021 https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/9/2964
|
| > We did not find differences in the prevalence of iron
| deficiency between vegetarians and omnivores among men and
| women who do not menstruate. Among women who menstruate,
| vegetarians had a higher prevalence of iron deficiency than
| omnivores did.
|
| In this last one they'll mixed non-omnivorous together. Not
| sure why, and how to calculate it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Spinach doesn't have a lot of iron. The reputation is due to a
| late-19th century study that was mistaken, and found that
| spinach had 10x the iron that it actually does.
|
| https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2015/08/on-spinach-i...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| "We regret to inform you that the people who were sacked have
| just been sacked themselves"
|
| https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey.
| ..
| m0llusk wrote:
| Iron supplements are often used, so it would be interesting to
| know if they also might be significant risk factors.
| fyt2024 wrote:
| I remember a paper long time ago that claimed that one reason why
| women have higher life spans than men is lower iron content in
| their blood due to menstruation.
| homarano wrote:
| Women have a consistently lower mortality rate than men at all
| ages 20-80 with no notable change around menopause.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mortality-rate-for-men-a...
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Men tend to be in higher risk situations more often than
| women.
| Beijinger wrote:
| "..that one reason why.."
|
| Reading competence
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Please refrain from personal attacks.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Here's an interesting article that talks about sexual
| differences in life span, which seems to be correlated with the
| size of the sex chromosome:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/secret-long-life-mat...
|
| Basically, for whatever reason, a larger sex chromosome (X is
| much bigger than Y) confers a better chance of survival.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I thought it was because females have two copies of the X, so
| defects in a region of one copy can be compensated for by the
| other. RAID-1 ftw.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| >This unevenness hints that factors other than the presence
| of certain sex chromosomes might also strongly influence
| longevity, the team says. One of these factors could be
| sexual selection. Exaggerated physical traits and elaborate
| behaviors make males of some species more attractive to
| females but require large amounts of energy and take a toll
| on overall health.
|
| Perhaps the riskiness of male behavior in humans is built in
| at the chromosonal level...
| samatman wrote:
| Headline stripped of bullshit: "Fe(3+) reactivates telomerase of
| _in vitro_ colorectal cancer cells ".
| eshack94 wrote:
| It took me way too long to find that (I didn't notice your
| comment til after).
|
| _Sigh_ at the clickbait headlines.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| It pays to be careful with studies like this because even if the
| statement given is proven to be true, that does not logically
| imply that it is optimal to reduce red meat consumption.
|
| As a thought experiment (I'm completely making up these claims,
| but they do at least seem plausible), imagine a world in which
| regular coffee consumption resulted in some small increase in
| cancer risk, but then also regular coffee consumption was
| correlated with say, academic success, success at work, had some
| appetite suppressing effects, etc.
|
| If the latter outweighs the former then the cancer risk is
| probably worth it even just longevity wise. Like how we know that
| going out in the sun increases cancer risk but also is just,
| well, good for us, to a degree.
|
| But of course the media will just run with a headline, which is
| why it sometimes feels as if the science is constantly
| "changing".
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Average hn reader needs more sun exposure than he does because
| the vitD boost will probably worth the cancer risk.
|
| With red meat the known benefits peaks (way) lower than average
| consumption. I'm not an expert but that looks to be shown more
| than the opposite. On a personal anecdote my doctor tells last
| week optimum is at 1meal/2weeks. He's maybe not aware of
| breaking discoveries but this looks to be in range with what's
| discussed here and there.
|
| I like critical thinking nevertheless and it would be
| interesting to learn more.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Right. The question remains though about what we mean by
| "known benefits".
|
| I chose caffeine as an example because I think that it's
| completely nontrivial to calculate. The physical pathways of
| things like "well this makes that molecule do this and have
| some x% chance to mutate and so on and so you get cancer", or
| the statistical output of "well people in the coffee cohort
| have % higher rates of this cancer" are much easier to
| accurately study than things like "if you drink coffee you
| are 3% more likely to get into law school and therefore
| become significantly wealthier and probably live a
| longer/healthier life and we can measure that impact
| precisely".
|
| It's also not at all obvious that lifespan above all else is
| the thing to maximise. e.g. maybe red meat reduces lifespan
| but makes your 20s-60s more fun because you're likely to be
| more muscular or whatever.
|
| My personal feeling is that aside from really really bad
| things like smoking, heavy alcohol use, heroin etc the error
| bars are too large to make decisions purely on long-term
| health impact alone.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Why are you so eager to fantasize about some "other
| benefit" with no evidence whatsoever of it, while evidence
| is presented on the harmful effects in many studies at this
| point. Would you think the same way about "poisons" or
| plastic contamination? Pollution?
|
| Correlation != causation and all of that, but as the US has
| increased meat consumption and processed foods colon cancer
| has been on the rise, including younger and younger adults.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Why would you think the same way about the benefits of
| plastic contamination as the benefits of red meat? One
| was consumed for millions of the years, the other has
| been around for decades.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I think you're comparing two things here.
|
| Eating red meat is overall a beneficial activity. It
| might be suboptimal / marginally less healthy compared to
| say, eating chicken or tofu.
|
| Consuming plastic particulates, pollution, poisons etc
| are completely undesirable.
|
| A better example might be something like drinking water
| out of a plastic bottle. Maybe the plastics leach into
| the water. But maybe the health benefit of always having
| a bottle of water with you is worth it.
| fakedang wrote:
| I wrote this in another comment earlier, but red meat is the
| most energy-efficient food source available for consumption
| in digestive terms, simply because our bodies were designed
| to process large amounts of protein rapidly - compared to
| plant matter that needs to be broken down multiple times.
| There's a reason herbivores have 4 stomachs. Human bodies
| basically evolved as Apex predators and a meat diet helped
| that, as well as was responsible for it. Meat, berries and
| tubers for hunter-gatherers to put it succinctly.
|
| We only adopted carbs because back in the day, cereals were
| the most efficient way to feed a large population (compared
| to say large-scale veggie cultivation) for an active societal
| workforce. But with us slowly and inevitably turning into
| lumbering sedentary creatures, it makes no sense to continue
| eating as many carbs as we are culturally accustomed to,
| instead resorting to meats and veggies to adequately cover up
| that deficit. Unfortunately, you need a ton of veggies to
| make up that deficit, but you can make do with a much smaller
| sized portion of meat than you're usually accustomed to (as
| we see with East Asian diets).
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Is it the meat or the sodium nitrite used to cure it?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrite#Cancer
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-25 23:02 UTC)